Those Darn Gadgets... Keeping The Youth Of America Awake All Night

from the or-maybe-not dept

The headline certainly looks ominous enough: Technology keeps teens awake, study shows. A new study has found that (surprise, surprise) teenagers don't get the recommended amount of sleep -- and that there's at least some sort of correlation between the number of gadgets in their bedroom and the amount of (non) sleep the teens get. Of course, the tech story is just one angle, and other articles on the same exact study don't even bother to mention the gadget angle. Perhaps that's because it's not clear that it's really the gadgets that are the issue. There doesn't seem to be any comparison to data from the past where gadgets weren't around, which would be a lot more interesting. Certainly, it's easy to see how kids using computers and mobile phones to chat away with friends or surf the internet could potentially be staying up later than before -- but it's not clear this study proves anything just yet.

I am 15 and ive been staying up fairly late (wicked late on weekends) on my computer like back when I was 11 years old. My friend stays up till like 12 am sometimes on school nights. Sleeping is just sooo boring.

Re: sleep

The problem

The problem in my mind is that everyone is too busy. This is especially true in school when you have so much homework and such to do. Even if getting the recommended amount of sleep is possible, the problem is that you start to feel like all you're doing is working and sleeping. Unfortunately, it seems to be that the only thing you can possibly afford to take time away from is sleeping. It may be detrimental to your physical health, but mentally I don't think that most people can go without any form of relaxation for an extended period of time.

I must say that students in high school (HS) don't have as much school work as you think. During HS I can remember gonig home and doing pretty much nothing the entire night. It was very possible to get all your homework done in class, study hall, or elsewhere. I managed to get everything I needed done as well as play basketball and run XCountry. If parents are worried about the sleep that kids are getting in HS they should see the lack of sleep they kids get in college, especially if they are going after a technical degree such as engineering or computer science. I can remember staying up for all night multiple time and then take a quick 30 min nap before class the next day.

Re:

Maybe where you went to school, but in the HS I worked for there was no such thing as study hall, and in order to keep accredidation, there was very little down time during class. There was supposed to be no point at which a student is not "being engaged"(this may be new age doublespeak for taught). It really complicates things for the students who do sports and/or work after school, they don't get a lot of down time.

I must say that students in high school (HS) don't have as much school work as you think. During HS I can remember gonig home and doing pretty much nothing the entire night. It was very possible to get all your homework done in class, study hall, or elsewhere. I managed to get everything I needed done as well as play basketball and run XCountry.

Speak for yourself on that statement. I don't know how long it's been since you were in high school, but these days high school students do have a lot of homework. Also, you evidently didn't take many (or any) challenging courses; if you take any type of challenging course these days, it's more than just a "study hall" assignment.

Re:

"I must say that students in high school (HS) don't have as much school work as you think. During HS I can remember gonig home and doing pretty much nothing the entire night. "

im not sure where you went to school either. i had TONS of homework and studying and i was always "engaged" in school, didnt have study hall. i had practice or a game after school year around. student council, nhs, spanish club, dfyit, etc ...

but we were using college books in high school...

i usually got about 4 or 5 hours of sleep. and when i went to college, it was no different. tons of homework and projects but i had less extracuricular stuff related school.

Re:

You're crazy if you think that high school's a breeze. I graduated two years ago and there wasn't a night that I didn't have just as much homework as I have now in college. Granted, I took all honors and AP classes but that not withstanding, high school students have to run on a constant sleep deffict just as much as anyone else. There are so many pressures on high school students today to succeed in order to get into college that gadgets make life easier and allows them to get more sleep by increasing efficiency. With out them, I don't know how i would have survived. It's all part of the high speed, high performance society that we live in today.

On the issue

I agree with the first post. Though, I have no doubt that it isn't a coincedence that teens get less sleep when there are gadgets in the room, you also have to look at any distraction. I was just like the first poster. I would stay up super late reading a good book. And, similar to the third poster.....Sleep is for those who don't play World of Warcraft!

its true

Teens don't get enough sleep because they spend too much time doing what they want. Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I knwo I'm not, but thats the only friggin point of living. Oh yeah, and that whole reproduction thing, but America hates that too.

You want to know what REALLY wastes their time? I'll tell you. It's school. We all know that it doesn't take 13 years to be taught everything you need to know by the time you graduate highschool.

Want to know what keeps me up even more? My homework. Tonight I know I'm going to end up staying up way past 2 or 3, and that's usually the point where I just say "oh, well it'll just be easier if I stay up all night" (it's easier to stay up than it is to wake up after a couple hours of sleep). But I also know I've dug my own grave. I have several essays to turn in before the semester ends, and I knew about them plenty in advance. I just put it off until now, when they NEED to be in.

Honestly, we're teenagers. We do what we want to do. Sleep isn't all that fun, so we don't do it.

Re: #19

Wow... what courses are you taking? I was taking Calc, Algebra, English, CS, Physics, Chem just last year, and even though it wasn't just a "study hall" assignment, I almost never spent more than 30 minutes a day studying (exceptions were big assignments and finals). Even though HS might seem hard, wait till you get to university.

Changes in how school is done

I personally hated HS. They told you what classes to take and you pretty much had no say so as to when you took that class or who from. They assigned your schedule and you could not change it no matter what.

I personally think that middle school should be more like HS and HS should be more like community college. I would have gotten a lot more out of HS if this was how things were. I got horrible grades in HS and better grades by almost a full grade point in college.

Re: FYI

Um. Would you care to defend that? We do not use those email addresses for anything. They are simply there in case we need to contact the commenter, as has happened on occassion. We do not put them into a list. We do not do anything else with them, and we do not even require a valid email address.

So, if you're worried, don't put in an email address, but you are completely wrong that entering an email address here increases your risk of getting spam.

So, if you're going to make completely baseless statements, you should at least have something to back it up... because in this case you're 100% wrong.

youth and sleep

I'm 30, I grew up playing lemonade stand on the commodor64 and playing hours of pitfall, river raid, and other assorted atari games. When I was a kid there was no internet, I loved computers but because of the lack of connectivity I was forced to find other things to do. We'd go outside and play "night games" in the summer, like "kick the can", we'd play baseball during the day or toss around the football, bike around town, go "bummin" (which consistet of walking to the nearest gas station for a candy bar and a soda), or go skateboarding. We'd build forts, we converted a shed in the back yard into a club house, I went to radio shack and bought a 300 foot coaxial cable to run cable tv to a television we found in the trash. Those were the good old days. When technology was growing but not taking over. I slept at night because I was tired from the "negative" effects of playing outside - sunshine, fresh air, and exercise. Today I'm still a kid but technology has only enabled me to do work literally 24 hours a day if I wish, if I want to play video games I stay up late into the night to do so. If I was a kid today I'd probably never leave the house, be on my wireless phone while surfing the internet, and chatting online with other friends I may never physically see. All this does is intertwine the mind with the technology. Technology never sleeps. I don't think that kids are bored because of lack of things to do, I think there is just too much available for instant gratification that gathering up kids for a baseball game is just too much of a pain when you can go online with your PS2 or XBOX360 and find a baseball game going on at any given time of the day. it's too bad they don't have games that incorporate movement so that the hours of play result in fatigue, then you'd have kids that could actually sleep, regardless of how many gadgets are present.

"Yes I love technology, but not as much as you you see, but I still love technology, always and forever......allllwayyss...and....forever....."

What a wierd synopsis.

What's your point? Are you trying to highlight the point in the original study where they show that indeed there is a correlation with #gadgets? Or are you trying to somehow minimize that observation with your super-scientific notion that the fact that other articles that don't quote the original research on that point is conclusive evidence that the original research is flawed? Shoddy work.

these kids today ...

when i was their age, we didn't have computers, or video games, or cell phones or dvd's. cable? please. we only had three channels, which went off the air in the wee hours.

if we wanted to be insomniacs we had to work at it! like poster #1, under our covers with flashlights, reading books! remember books? yeah, we read them! and if there was nothing to read, we wrote! bad teenage poetry! uphill through the snow!

hmmph. young insomniacs these days don't know how good they've got it.

School work is for school, not home. Students being required to do school work at home while spending 7 hours every weekday at class minus a couple months of vacation per year for 13 fucking years is abso-fuckin-lutely ridiculous. Thats a lot of time you're wasting in their lives.

I can back that up Personally. I learned every little nitty grity detail I know about computers on my own time. Look at my sourceforge profile if you're curious, its accurate. All that time I wasted at school or doing homework I could have been home learning something much more important (more important because I make a living of it). Public Schooling wasted nearly 2 solid years of my time.

7 hours per day, 5 days per week, 38 weeks per year, for 13 years. thats 17,290 hours learning how to pronounce each letter of the alphabet, perform sufficient algebra, simple geometry, and learn a shit load of lies about american history (ie, the pillage of the native americans)

Separation of Church and State -- Separation of Home and Class, anyone? At least public schools.

Bad Parents Not Bad Gadgets

Gadgets don't keep kids up at night, thier bad habits and parents not paying attention do. If a kid doesn't get enough sleep cause he plays Quake all night it's not the PC's fault but the parents. If your kid is tired all the time even though he goes into his room to go to "sleep" at 9 then he probably isn't sleeping. How hard is it to check on your kid every now and then to make sure he went to bed? My mother was a single parent with 2 jobs raising 3 boys and our bedtimes were enforced even in HS. I got caught a few times staying up late talking on the phone or playing video games and each time I was told to go directly to bed. There was no saving the game or finishing the conversation I got my a$$ in bed or faced the consequences which would have been the loss of whatever it was I was doing. I am so tired of these studies blaming everything on anything other than the real problem, parents not doing thier jobs. if you simply lay down rules and enforce them the kids will go to bed, not shoot at people, and get good grades. It really is that simple. Kids need instruction and some discipline without they turn into delinquents.

Huh

"It's newsworthy because tards like you think you've learned all you need to know without "a proper education." Sadly, we can all see that this is not true based on your inability to write coherently."

Public education is FAR from "proper", and thats enough with the grammar and punctuation comments, you troll.

another thing keeping the kids awake....

When I was a teen...

I remember being 15 or 16 and having 3 jobs - working 40-60 hours a week, attending zero hour classes (an hour before school started) and still stayed up as late as possible coding on my new 'gadgets'. (At the time this was a 1KB RAM (lol) Timex Sinclair computer I built from a kit and learned how to program in BASIC and machine language on as well as various Commodore home PC models).

I slept 2-4 hours a night during the week and still maintained a 3.8 GPA. I hated sleeping, it seemed like a boring colossal waste of time to me.

I enjoy sleep much more now, as a 35 year old adult, but I still don't feel like I need to or have to have 8 hours a day. I'm lucky if I get 6 hours.

These are TEENAGERS, gadgets have nothing to do with it - teens just don't needf as much sleep as we think they do.

Agreed

"I must say that students in high school (HS) don't have as much school work as you think." You are absolutly right. Its the same now to. I can get most of my work done in study and class and on the bus and all that crap. People just seem to spazz out over kids haveing to much home work when its not all that bad. Unless you are one of those over acheveing kids that do nothing but work.

Time management

Nobody has "too much homework" - that's a crock. I took virtually every difficult science course I could manage in high school because I thought it would get me farther when I went to college (HAH!).
I highly doubt I did more than two hours homework a night, and typically far less than that. I had people in most of my classes constantly crying and moaning that they got too much homework... Where? How?I'm absolutely convinced that the people who complain about having too much work assigned lack the basic time management skills to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Like it or not, when you're out in the real world you're going to have to do the same - bad employees who can't manage their time get fired, and after a while when your resume shows that you haven't held a job for longer than six months anywhere, nobody is going to hire you.

Figure it out early - stop pissing away your day! You can't do homework in front of the TV and if you daydream and fall behind in class you need to bloody well get caught up on your own time and not just flounder along!

Actually, the second article does talk about the link between teens not getting enough sleep and having gadgets. (4th paragraph from the bottom.) The difference is that the first article is all about what's supposedly causing the lack of sleep while the second article is about the lack of sleep itself.

"These are TEENAGERS, gadgets have nothing to do with it - teens just don't needf as much sleep as we think they do."

On the contrary, Teenagers do generally require shit loads of sleep. I'm 20, and for as long as I can remember I sleep 12 consecutive hours if nobody wakes me up and I'm a happy boy. Now, some may not need sleep at all. I know people younger than I that sleep around 5 hours per week.

Basically, Sleep is only effective once you're sleepign hard, you say. I'd have to agree. I don't want to go to bed until I'm dead beat, and thats only after at least 14 hours of consciousness, and a previous 12 hours of sleep under my belt. that dose'nt even fit into a day. The way the calendar year is formatted, and the way days are partitioned, dosen't take into consideration human health (or at least fatigue). If companies and schools ran fewer hours each day, we'd all be much happier (and less tired) people.

i disagree

hi, i am a 14 year old and i would like to argue about this.
hows it a surprise surprise* that teens dont get enough sleep at night? are you trying to say ALL of us suck, ill admit i usually crash at about 2 or 3 in the morning every night but thats cuz im so freaking busy with sports, school, computer, music, photography, skateboarding,,, im really bussy. and it kind of bugs me that your stereotyping all of us cuz quite fankly i know some pansies that go to bed at 8 at night.